Question

Topic: Career/Training

What To Pay How To Hire...

Posted by Anonymous on 11/20/2009 at 1:26 PM ET 250 Points
Hi

We are turning a local website into a national one. We have a site called baseballcamp.com that presently serves our baseball camp. We have a very high ranking on the first page of google and yahoo searching under baseball camps. We want to turn the site into one that will serve as a search desitinatom for people looking for baseball camp. We want to see ad space nationally. We want to hire salespeople but arent sure how to find them an what to pay. I assume we pay straight commissin but what % is standard.

Any advice will be appreciated!

Thanks

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  • Posted by SteveByrneMarketing on 11/22/2009 at 1:53 AM Accepted
    Yes, you do have a high ranking using the keyword phrase "baseball camp". Of course, you own the domain baseballcamp.com so a high ranking is pretty much a done deal.

    Are there any other keyword phrases that produce a high ranking?

    Turning the site into one that will serve as a search destination site is another matter. Do you have a business plan? Are you well enough capitalized to implement a plan? What about your management team?

    A model based on hiring (?) commissioned salespeople is a pretty shakey way to start.

    I suggest you hire a professional consultant to guide you through the process.

    hope this helps,

    Steve
  • Posted on 11/22/2009 at 8:45 AM Author
    Hi Steve

    Thanks for the comments. We would like to revamp the website and have a separate page for each state baseballcamp.com/Texas for example. We were thinking of hiring some newspaper ad salesman to work on commission as a way of keeping overhead low. With such a high Google rank we figure it would be a good sell becuase searching baseball camps Texas would probably result in our site. You don't think this is the Ray to
    go? I was thinking with newspaper ad sales so slow we may be able to attract salespeople looking to make extra money and since they are in ad sales already they have experience.

    Any other insight would help. By the way that I pretty much our business plan! We can do the website in house and we wouldn't have much overhead to start especially working with commission salespeople.

    Thanks!
  • Posted by SteveByrneMarketing on 11/22/2009 at 1:16 PM Member
    "You don't think this is the way to go?"

    It's not that your current direction will not work, it's that I'm not seeing your value proposition to targets, your business model and revenue potential.

    How much can the commissioned salesperson expect to make? How easy will it be for them to close a sale? How many prospects are there in each state? What marketing tools are you providing the salesperson, e.g. video, powerpoint, printed marketing materials etc.
  • Posted by Levon on 11/22/2009 at 1:30 PM Accepted
    The more you can automate the more long term revenue you will be able to extract out of this site.
  • Posted by telemoxie on 11/22/2009 at 3:42 PM Accepted
    it seems to me there are thousands and thousands of undercapitalized business owners who expect to attract effective and experienced yet somehow unemployed salespeople to implement their nebulous marketing plans.

    My personal opinion is that marketing costs money.

    I spent over a dozen years as a freelance outbound marketing guy. I was approached by literally hundreds of people who expected me to invest my time and my money to market their product. But they were unwilling to invest their own money to market their own product or service.

    My honest opinion is that you need professional (paid) marketing advice.
  • Posted on 11/23/2009 at 4:57 PM Author
    Thanks fo the responses. Does anyone know what the commission is for a newspaper ad sales rep? Our site will be selling space ad space to other baseball camps across the country. Much like site like kids camp.com sells ad space to summer camps. They charge upwards of $800-$1000 a year for ads on their site. With baseballcamp.com we have a very good gogle ranking which would be attractive to other baseball camps to get their camps listed on out site. Based on ads we have run for our company ads aren't very expansive in local newspapers we typically spend $60 per ad so if a sales rep is able to sell ads on our site for a fee hundred dollars we think it would be an attractive part time job. They can also sell ads country wide. It like local ads they sell now so the potential to make some extra money may be tempting. If anyone knows what is a typical commssion % please let me know.

    Thanks.
  • Posted by SteveByrneMarketing on 11/23/2009 at 10:56 PM Member
    "Compensation: Commission only - 20% of gross ad sales"

    I have seen 15% as well. So the range might be 10% to as high as 50% depending (it's always depending).

    Hope this answers your question.

    Steve
  • Posted on 12/2/2009 at 9:00 PM Accepted
    You have to figure out how much time and effort a salesperson would have to spend to land an advertising contract and the revenue it might generate. Then you figure out how much it would take to motivate the salesperson to invest the time in that proposition. To get the commission rate, divide the amount it would take to motivate into the total ad revenue generated.

    My gut reaction, just thinking about it, is probably in the range of 35-50%. There isn't any "standard" for things like this. It will cost whatever it takes to get the job done. Until you try it, you won't know. You might want to do the sales job yourself for a few months, so you have a better feel for what's involved, what closing ratio you can expect, etc.

    As others have suggested, you may also want to do some more rigorous business planning to determine how much you'll have to invest, what the likely payoff will be (for you and the sales reps), and how long it will take to break even and recover your investment.

    If you want serious sales representation, you probably ought to offer some base salary or non-recoverable draw against commission. Otherwise you'll get "leftovers" for the sales effort and you'll never know how much you could have gotten with a serious front-burner effort. Working on a part-time basis for a meager commission on an unproven product/service is not going to be attractive to a true sales professional.
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